First Part: Abstract Right
i Property

A person must translate his freedom into an external sphere
in order to exist as Idea. Personality is the first, still wholly
abstract, determination of the absolute and infinite will, and
therefore this sphere distinct from the person, the sphere capable
of embodying his freedom, is likewise determined as what is immediately
different and separable from him.

Addition: The rationale of property is to be found not in the satisfaction
of needs but in the supersession of the pure subjectivity of personality.
In his property a person exists for the first time as reason.
Even if my freedom is here realised first of all in an external
thing, and so falsely realised, nevertheless abstract personality
in its immediacy can have no other embodiment save one characterised
by immediacy.

§ 42

What is immediately different from free mind is that which,
both for mind and in itself, is the external pure and simple,
a thing, something not free, not personal, without rights.0P>

Remark:
'Thing', like 'the objective', has two opposed meanings. If we
say that's the thing' or 'the thing is what matters, not the person',
'thing' means what is substantive. On the other hand, when 'thing'
is contrasted with 'Person' as such, not with the particular subject,
it means the opposite of what is substantive, i.e. that whose
determinate character lies in its pure externality. From the
point of view of free mind, which must, of course, be distinguished
from mere consciousness, the external is external absolutely,
and it is for this reason that the determinate character assigned
to nature by the concept is inherent externality.

Addition: Since a thing lacks subjectivity, it is external not merely to
the subject but to itself. Space and time are external in this
way. As sentient, I am myself external, spatial, and temporal.
As receptive of sensuous intuitions, I receive them from something
which is external to itself. An animal can intuit, but the soul
of an animal has for its object not its soul, itself, but something
external.

§ 43

As the concept in its immediacy, and so as in essence
a unit, a person has a natural existence partly within himself
and partly of such a kind that he is related to it as to an external
world. It is only these things in their immediacy as things,
not what they are capable of becoming through the mediation of
the will, i.e. things with determinate characteristics, which
are in question here where the topic under discussion is personality,
itself at this point still in its most elementary immediacy.

Remark:
Mental aptitudes, erudition, artistic skill, even things ecclesiastical
(like sermons, masses, prayers, consecration of votive objects),
inventions, and so forth, become subjects of a contract, brought
on to a parity, through being bought and sold, with things recognised
as things. It may be asked whether the artist, scholar, &c.,
is from the legal point of view in possession of his art, erudition,
ability to preach a sermon, sing a mass, &c., that is, whether
such attainments are 'things'. We may hesitate to call such abilities,
attainments, aptitudes, &c., 'things', for while possession
of these may be the subject of business dealings and contracts,
as if they were things, there is also something inward and mental
about it, and for this reason the Understanding may be in perplexity
about how to describe such possession in legal terms, because
its field of vision is as limited to the dilemma that this is
'either a thing or not a thing' as to the dilemma 'either finite
or infinite'. Attainments, erudition, talents, and so forth,
are, of course, owned by free mind and are some thing internal
and not external to it, but even so, by expressing them it may
embody them in something external and alienate them (see below),
and in this way they are put into the category of 'things'. Therefore
the are not immediate at the start but only acquire this character
through the mediation of mind which reduces its inner possessions
to immediacy and externality.

It was an unjustifiable and unethical proviso of Roman law that
children were from their father's point of view 'things'. Hence
he was legally the owner of his children, although, of course,
he still also stood to them in the ethical relation of love (though
this relation must have been much weakened by the injustice of
his legal position). Here, then, the two qualities 'being a thing'
and 'not being a thing' were united, though quite wrongly.

In the sphere of abstract right, we are concerned only with the
person as person, and therefore with the particular (which is
indispensable if the person's freedom is to have scope and reality)
only in so far as it is something separable from the person and
immediately different from him, no matter whether this separability
constitutes the essential nature of the particular, or whether
the particular receives it only through the mediation of the subjective
will. Hence in this sphere we are concerned with mental aptitudes,
erudition, &c., only in so far as they are possessions in
a legal sense; we have not to treat here the possession of our
body and mind which we can achieve through education, study, habit,
&c., and which exists as an inward property of mind. But
it is not until we come to deal with alienations that we need
begin to speak of the transition of such mental property
into the external world where it falls under the category of property
in the legal sense.

§ 44

A person has as his substantive end the right of putting
his will into any and every thing and thereby making it his, because
it has no such end in itself and derives its destiny and soul
from his will. This is the absolute right of appropriation which
man has over all 'things'.

Remark:
The so-called 'philosophy' which attributes reality in the sense
of self-subsistence and genuine independent self-enclosed existence
to unmediated single things, to the non-personal, is directly
contradicted by the free will's attitude to these things. The
same is true of the other
philosophy which assures us that mind cannot apprehend the truth
or know the nature of the thing-in-itself. While so-called 'external'
things have a show of self-subsistence for consciousness, intuition,
and representative thinking, the free will idealises that type
of actuality and so is its truth.

Addition:
All things may become man's property, because man is free will
and consequently is absolute, while what stands over against him
lacks this quality. Thus everyone has the right to make his will
the thing or to make the thing his will, or in other words to
destroy the thing and transform it into his own; for the thing,
as externality, has no end in itself; it is not infinite self-relation
but something external to itself. A living thing too (an animal)
is external to itself in this way and is so far itself a thing.
Only the will is the infinite, absolute in contrast with everything
other than itself, while that other is on its side only relative.
Thus 'to appropriate' means at bottom only to manifest the pre-eminence
of my will over the thing and to prove that it is not absolute,
is not an end in itself. This is made manifest when I endow the
thing with some purpose not directly its own. When the living
thing becomes my property, I give to it a soul other than the
one it had before, I give to it my soul. The free will, therefore,
is the idealism which does not take things as they are to be absolute,
while realism pronounces them to be absolute, even if they only
exist in the form of finitude. Even an animal has gone beyond
this realist philosophy since it devours things and so proves
that they are not absolutely self-subsistent.

§ 45

To have power over a thing ab extra constitutes possession.
The particular aspect of the matter, the fact that I make something
my own as a result of my natural need, impulse, and caprice, is
the particular interest satisfied by possession. But I as free
will am an object to myself in what I possess and thereby also
for the first time am an actual will, and this is the aspect which
constitutes the category of property, the true and right
factor in possession.

Remark:
If emphasis is placed on my needs, then the possession of property
appears as a means to their satisfaction, but the true position
is that, from the standpoint of freedom, property is the first
embodiment of freedom and so is in itself a substantive end.

§ 46

Since my will, as the will of a person, and so as a single will,
becomes objective to me in property, property acquires the character
of private property; and common property of such a nature that
it may be owned by separate persons acquires the character of
an inherently dissoluble partnership in which the retention of
my share is explicitly a matter of my arbitrary preference.

Remark:
The nature of the elements makes it impossible for the use of
them to become so particularised as to be the private possession
of anyone. In the Roman agrarian laws there was a clash between
public and private ownership of land. The latter is the more
rational and therefore had to be given preference even at the
expense of other rights.

One factor in family testamentary trusts contravenes the right
of personality and so the right of private property. But the
specific characteristics pertaining to private property may have
to be subordinated to a higher sphere of right (e.g. to a society
or the state), as happens, for instance, when private property
is put into the hands of a so-called 'artificial' person and into
mortmain. Still, such exceptions to private property cannot be
grounded in chance, in private caprice, or private advantage,
but only in the rational organism of the state.

The general principle that underlies Plato's ideal state violates
the right of personality by forbidding the holding of private
property. The idea of a pious or friendly and even a compulsory
brotherhood of men holding their goods in common and rejecting
the principle of private property may readily present itself to
the disposition which mistakes the true nature of the freedom
of mind and right and fails to apprehend it in its determinate
moments. As for the moral or religious view behind this idea,
when Epicurus's friends proposed to form such an association holding
goods in common, he forbade them, precisely on the ground that
their proposal betrayed distrust and that those who distrusted
each other were not friends.

Addition:
In property my will is the will of a person; but a person is a
unit and so property becomes the personality of this unitary will.
Since property is the means whereby I give my will an embodiment,
property must also have the character of being 'this' or 'mine'.
This is the important doctrine of the necessity of private property.
While the state may cancel private ownership in exceptional cases,
it is nevertheless only the state that can do this; but frequently,
especially in our day, private property has been re-introduced
by the state. For example, many states have dissolved the monasteries,
and rightly, for in the last resort no community has so good a
right to property as a person has.

§ 47

As a person, I am myself an immediate individual; if we
give further precision to this expression, it means in the first
instance that I am alive in this bodily organism which is my external
existence) universal in content and undivided, the real pre-condition
of every further determined mode of existences But, all the same,
as person, I possess my life and my body, like other things, only
in so far as my will is in them.

Remark:
The fact that, considered as existing not as the concept explicit
but only as the concept in its immediacy, I am alive and have
a bodily organism, depends on the concept of life and on the concept
of mind as soul — on moments which are taken over here from the
Philosophy of Nature and from Anthropology.

I possess the members of my body, my life, only so long as I will
to possess them. An animal cannot maim or destroy itself, but
a man can.

Addition: Animals are in possession of themselves; their soul is in possession of their body. But they have no right to their life, because they do not will it.

§ 48

In so far as the body is an immediate existent, it is not in conformity
with mind. If it is to be the willing organ and soul-endowed
instruments of mind, it must first be taken into possession by
mind (see § 57). But from the point of view of others, I
am in essence a free entity in my body while my possession of
it is still immediate.

Remark:
It is only because I am alive as a free entity in my body that
this living existent ought not to be misused by being made a beast
of burden. While I am alive, my soul (the concept and, to use
a higher term, the free entity) and my body are not separated;
my body is the embodiment of my freedom and it is with my body
that I feel. It is therefore only abstract sophistical reasoning
which can so distinguish body and soul as to hold that the 'thing-in-itself',
the soul, is not touched or attacked if the body is maltreated
and the existent embodiment of personality is subjected to the
power of another. I can withdraw into myself out of my bodily
existence and make my body something external to myself; particular
feelings I can regard as something outside me and in chains I
can still be free. But this is my will; so far as others
are concerned, I am in my body. To be free from the point
of view of others is identical with being free in my determinate
existence. If another does violence to my body, he does violence
to me.

If my body is touched or suffers violence, then, because I feel,
I am touched myself actually, here and now. This creates the
distinction between personal injury and damage to my external
property, for in such property my will is not actually present
in this direct fashion.

§ 49

In relation to external things, the rational aspect is that I
possess property, but the particular aspect comprises subjective
aims, needs, arbitrariness, abilities, external circumstances,
and so forth (see § 45). On these mere possession as such
depends, but this particular aspect has in this sphere of abstract
personality not yet been established as identical with freedom.
What and how much I possess, therefore, is a matter of indifference
so far as rights are concerned.

Remark:
If at this stage we may speak of more persons than one, although
no such distinction has yet been made, then we may say that in
respect of their personality persons are equal. But this is an
empty tautology, for the person, as something abstract, has not
yet been particularised or established as distinct in some specific
way.

'Equality' is the abstract identity of the Understanding; reflective
thought and all kinds of intellectual mediocrity stumble on it
at once when they are confronted by the relation of unity to a
difference. At this point, equality could only be the equality
of abstract persons as such, and therefore the whole field of
possession, this terrain of inequality, falls outside it.

The demand sometimes made for an equal division of land, and other
available resources too, is an intellectualism all the more empty
and superficial in that at the heart of particular differences
there lies not only the external contingency of nature but also
the whole compass of mind, endlessly particularised and differentiated,
and the rationality of mind developed into an organism.

We may not speak of the injustice of nature in the unequal distribution
of possessions and resources, since nature is not free and therefore
is neither just nor unjust. That every one ought to have subsistence
enough for his needs is a moral wish and thus vaguely expressed
is well enough meant, but like anything that is only well meant
it lacks objectivity. On the other hand, subsistence is not the
same as possession and belongs to another sphere, i.e. to civil
society.

Addition:
The equality which might be set up, e.g. in connection with the
distribution of goods, would all the same soon be destroyed again,
because wealth depends on diligence. But if a project cannot
be executed, it ought not to be executed. Of course men are equal,
but only qua persons, that is, with respect only to the source
from which possession springs; the inference from this is that
everyone must have property. Hence, if you wish to talk of equality,
it is this equality which you must have in view. But this equality
is something apart from the fixing of particular amounts, from
the question of how much I own. From this point of view it is
false to maintain that justice requires everyone's property to
be equal, since it requires only that everyone shall own property.
The truth is that particularity is just the sphere where there
is room for inequality and where equality would be wrong. True
enough, men often lust after the goods of others, but that is
just doing wrong, since right is that which remains indifferent
to particularity.

§ 50

The principle that a thing belongs to the person who happens to
be the first in time to take it into his possession is immediately
self-explanatory and superfluous, because a second person cannot
take into his possession what is already the property of another.

Addition:
The points made so far have been mainly concerned with the proposition
that personality must be embodied in property. Now the fact that
the first person to take possession of a thing should also be
its owner is an inference from what has been said. The first
is the rightful owner, however, not because he is the first but
because he is a free will, for it is only by another's succeeding
him that he becomes the first.

§ 51

Since property is the embodiment of personality, my inward
idea and will that something is to be mine is not enough to make
it my property; to secure this end occupancy is requisite. The
embodiment which my willing thereby attains involves its recognisability
by others. The fact that a thing of which I can take possession
is a res nullius is (see § 50) a self-explanatory
negative condition of occupancy, or rather it has a bearing on
the anticipated relation to others.

Addition:
A person puts his will into a thing - that is just the concept
of property, and the next step is the realisation of this
concept. The inner act of will which consists in saying that
something is mine must also become recognisable by others. If
I make a thing mine, I give to it a predicate, 'mine', which
must appear in it in an external form and must not simply remain
in my inner will. It often happens that children lay stress on
their prior willing in preference to the seizure of a thing by
others. But for adults this willing is not sufficient, since
the form of subjectivity must be removed and must work its way
beyond the subjective to objectivity.

§ 52

Occupancy makes the matter of the thing my property, since matter
in itself does not belong to itself.

Remark:
Matter offers resistance to me — and matter is nothing except
the resistance it offers to me — that is, it presents itself to
my mind as something abstractly independent only when my mind
is taken abstractly as sensations (Sense-perception perversely
takes mind as sensation for the concrete and mind as reason for
the abstract.) In relation to the will and property, however,
this independence of matter has no truth. Occupancy, as an external
activity whereby we actualise our universal right of appropriating
natural objects, comes to be conditioned by physical strength,
cunning, dexterity, the means of one kind or another whereby we
take physical possession of things. Owing to the qualitative
differences between natural objects, mastery and occupancy of
these has an infinite variety of meanings and involves a restriction
and contingency that is just as infinite. Apart from that, a
'kind' of thing, or an element as such, is not the correlative
object of an individual person. Before it can become such and
be appropriated, it must first be individualised into single parts,
into a breath of air or a drink of water. In the fact that it
is impossible to take possession of an external 'kind' of thing
as such, or of an element, it is not the external physical impossibility
which must be looked on as ultimate, but the fact that a person,
as will, is characterised as individual, while as person he is
at the same time immediate individuality; hence as person
he is related to the external world as to single things (see Remark
to § 13 and § 43).

Thus the mastery and external possession of things becomes, in
ways that again are infinite, more or less indeterminate and incomplete.
Yet matter is never without an essential form of its own and
only because it has one is it anything. The more I appropriate
this form, the more do I enter into actual possession of the thing.
The consumption of food is an out and out alteration of its qualitative
character, the character on the strength of which it was what
it was before it was eaten. The training of my body in dexterity,
like the training of my mind, is likewise a more or less complete
occupancy and penetration of it. It is my mind which of all things
I can make most completely my own. Yet this actual occupancy
is different from property as such because property is complete
as the work of the free will alone. In face of the free will,
the thing retains no property in itself even though there still
remains in possession, as an external relation to an object, something
external. The empty abstraction of a matter without properties
which, when a thing is my property, is supposed to remain outside
me and the property of the thing, is one which thought must master.

Addition:
In Science of Rights, § 19 A, maintains that the farmer
has no right to his land as such but only to its products, to
its 'accidents', not to its 'substance'; he may not prevent others
from grazing cattle on it after harvest, unless, in addition to
cultivation rights, he has grazing rights for cattle of his own.
Thus, Fichte has raised the question whether the matter too belongs
to me if I impose a form on it. On his argument, after I had
made a golden cup, it would have to be open to someone else to
take the gold provided that in so doing he did no damage to my
work. However separable the matter may be in thought, still in
reality this distinction is an empty subtlety, because, if I take
possession of a field and plough it, it is not only the furrow
that is my property, but the rest as well, the furrowed earth.
That is to say, I will to take this matter, the whole thing,
into my possession; the matter therefore does not remain a res
nullius nor does it remain I its own property. Further, even
if the matter remains external to the form which I have given
to the object, the form is precisely a sign that I claim the thing
as mine. The thing therefore does not remain external to my will
or outside what I have willed. Hence there is nothing left to
be taken into possession by someone else.

§ 53

Property has its modifications determined in the course of the will's relation to the thing. This relation is

(A)taking possession of the thing directly (here it is in the thing qua something positive that the will has its embodiment);

(B)use(the thing is negative in contrast with the will and so it is in the thing as something to be negated that the will has its embodiment);

(C)alienation, the reflection of the will back from the thing into itself.

These three are respectively the positive, negative, and infinite
judgments of the will on the thing.

A. Taking Possession

§ 54

We take possession of a thing [a] by directly grasping it physically, [b] by forming it, and [c] by merely marking it as ours.

Addition: These modes of taking possession involve the advance from the category of singularity to that of universality. It is only of
a single thing that we can take possession physically, while marking
a thing as mine is taking possession of it in idea. In the latter
case I have an idea of the thing and mean that the thing as a
whole is mine, not simply the part which I can take into my possession
physically.

§ 55

[a] From the point of view of sensation, to grasp
a thing physically is the most complete of these modes, because
then I am directly present in this possession, and therefore my
will is recognisable in it. But at bottom this mode is only subjective,
temporary, and seriously restricted in scope, as well as by the
qualitative nature of the things grasped. — As a result of the
connection which I may effect between something and things which
have already become my property in other ways, or into which something
may otherwise be accidentally brought, the scope of this method
is somewhat enlarged, and the same result is produced by other
means also.

Remark:
Mechanical forces, weapons, tools, extend the range of my power.
Connections between my property and something else may be regarded
as making it more easily possible for me than for another owner,
or sometimes possible for me alone, to take possession of something
or to make use of it. Instances of such connections are that
my land may be on the seashore, or on a river bank; or my estate
may march with hunting country or pasture or land useful for some
other purposes stone or other mineral deposits may be under my
fields; there may be treasure in or under my ground, and so on.
The same is true of connections made by chance and subsequent
to possession, like some of what are called 'natural accessions',
such as alluvial deposits, &c., and jetsam. (Fetura
is an accession to my wealth too, but the connection here is an
organic one, it is not a case of a thing being added ab extra
to another thing already in my possession; and therefore fetura
is of a type quite different from the other accessions.) Alternatively,
the addition to my property may be looked upon as a non-self-subsistent
accident of the thing to which it has been added. In every case,
however, these are external conjunctions whose bond
of connection is neither life nor the concept. It devolves, therefore,
on the Understanding to adduce and weigh their pros and cons,
and on positive legislation to make decisions about them in accordance
with the extent to which the relation between the things conjoined
has or has not any essentiality.

Addition:
Taking possession is always piece-meal in type; I take into possession
no more than what I touch with my body. But here comes the second
point: external objects extend further than I can grasp. Therefore,
whatever I have in my grasp is linked with something else. It
is with my hand that I manage to take possession of a thing, but
its reach can be extended. What I hold in my hand - that magnificent
tool which no animal possesses - can itself be a means to gripping
something else. If I am in possession of something, the intellect
immediately draws the inference that it is not only the immediate
object in my grasp which is mine but also what is connected with
it. At this point positive law must enact its statutes since
nothing further on this topic can be deduced from the concept.

§ 56

[b] When I impose a form on something, the thing's
determinant character as mine acquires an independent externality
and ceases to be restricted to my presence here and now and to
the direct presence of my awareness and will.

Remark:
To impose a form on a thing is the mode of taking possession most
in conformity with the Idea to this extent, that it implies a
union of subject and object, although it varies endlessly with
the qualitative character of the objects and the variety of subjective
aims.

Under this head there also falls the formation of the organic.
What I do to the organic does not remain external to it but is
assimilated by it. Examples are the tilling of the soil, the
cultivation of plants, the taming in and feeding of animals, the
preservation of game, as well as contrivances for utilising raw
materials or the forces of nature and processes for making one
material produce effects on another, and so forth.

Addition: This forming of an object may in practice assume the most various
guises. In farming land I impose a form on it. Where inorganic
objects are concerned, the imposition of a form is not always
direct. For example, if I build a windmill, I have not imposed
a form on the air, but I have formed something for utilising the
air, though I am not on that account at liberty to call the air
mine, since I have not formed the air itself. Further, the preserving
of game may be regarded as a way of forming game, for we preserve
it with a view to maintaining the species. [The same is true
of] the taming of animals, only of course that is a more direct
way of forming them and it depends on me to a greater extent.

§ 57.

Man, pursuant to his immediate existence within himself,
is something natural, external to his concept. It is only through
the development of his own body and mind, essentially through
his self-consciousness's apprehension of itself as free, that
he takes possession of himself and becomes his own property and
no one else's.

Remark:
This taking possession of oneself, looked at from the opposite
point view, is the translation into actuality of what one is according
to one's concept, i.e. a potentiality, capacity, potency. In
that translation one's self-consciousness for the first time becomes
established as one's own, as one's object also and distinct from
self-consciousness pure and simple, and thereby capable of taking
the form of a 'thing' (compare Remark to § 43).

The alleged justification of slavery (by reference to all its
proximate beginnings through physical force, capture in war, saving
and preservation of life, upkeep, education, philanthropy, the
slave's own acquiescence, and so forth), as well as the justification
of a slave-ownership as simple lordship in general, and all historical
views of the justice of slavery and lordship, depend on regarding
man as a natural entity pure and simple, as an existent not in
conformity with its concept (an existent also to which arbitrariness
is appropriate). The argument for the absolute injustice of slavery,
on the other hand, adheres to the concept of man as mind, as something
inherently free. This view is one-sided in regarding man as free
by nature, or in other words it takes the concept as such in its
immediacy, not the Idea, as the truth. This antinomy rests, like
all others, on the abstract thinking which asserts both the moments
of an Idea in separation from one another and clings to each of
them in its independence and so in its inadequacy to the Idea
and in its falsity. Free mind consists precisely (see §
21) in its being no longer implicit or as concept alone, but in
its transcending this formal stage of its being, and eo ipso
its immediate natural existence, until the existence which
it gives to itself is one which is solely its own and free. The
side of the antinomy which asserts the concept of freedom therefore
has the merit of implying the absolute starting-point, though
only the starting-point, for the discovery of truth, while the
other side goes no further than existence without the concept
and therefore excludes the outlook of rationality and right altogether.
The position of the free will, with which right and the science
of right begin, is already in advance of the false position at
which man, as a natural entity and only the concept implicit,
is for that reason capable of being enslaved. This false, comparatively
primitive, phenomenon of slavery is one which befalls mind when
mind is only at the level of consciousness. The dialectic of
the concept and of the purely immediate consciousness of freedom
brings about at that point the fight for recognition and the relationship
of master and slave. But that objective mind, the content of
the right, should no longer be apprehended in its subjective concept
alone, and consequently that man's absolute unfitness for slavery
should no longer be apprehended as a mere 'ought to be', is something
which does not come home to our minds until we recognise that
the Idea of freedom is genuinely actual only as the state.

Addition: To adhere to man's absolute freedom - one aspect of the matter
- is eo ipso to condemn slavery. Yet if a man is a slave,
his own will is responsible for his slavery, just as it is its
will, which is responsible if a people is subjugated. Hence the
wrong of slavery lies at the door, not simply of enslavers or conquerors,
but of the slaves and the conquered themselves. Slavery occurs
in man's transition from the state of nature to genuinely ethical
conditions; it occurs in a world where a wrong is still right.
At that stage wrong has validity and so is necessarily in place.

§ 58

[c]
The mode of taking possession which in itself is not actual but is only representative of my will is to mark the thing, and the meaning of the mark is supposed to be that I have put my will into the thing. In its objective scope and its meaning, this mode of taking possession is very indeterminate.

Addition:
To take possession by marking a thing is of all sorts of taking
possession the most complete, since the mark is implicitly at
work to some extent in the other sorts too. When I grasp a thing
or form it, this also means in the last resort that I mark it,
and mark it for others, in order to exclude them and show that
I have put my will into the thing. The notion of the mark, that
is to say, is that the thing does not count as the thing which
it is but as what it is supposed to signify. A cockade, for instance,
signifies citizenship of a state, though the colour has no connection
with the nation and represents not itself but the nation. By
being able to give a mark to things and thereby to acquire them,
man just shows his mastery over things.

B. Use of the Thing

§ 59

By being taken into possession, the thing acquires the predicate
'mine' and my will is related to it positively. Within this identity,
the thing is equally established as something negative, and
my will in this situation is a particular will, i.e. need, inclination,
and so forth. Yet my need, as the particular aspect of a single
will, is the positive element which finds satisfaction, and the
thing, as something negative in itself, exists only for
my need and is at its service. — The use of the thing is my
need being externally realised through the change, destruction,
and consumption of the thing. The thing thereby stands revealed
as naturally self-less and so fulfils its destiny.

Remark:
The fact that property is realised and actualised only in use
floats before the minds of those who look upon property as derelict
and a res nullius if it is not being put to any
use, and who excuse its unlawful occupancy on the ground that
it has not been used by its owner. But the owner's will, in accordance
with which a thing is his, is the primary substantive basis of
property; use is a further modification of property, secondary
to that universal basis, and is only its manifestation and particular
mode.

Addition:
While in marking a thing I am taking possession in a universal
way of the thing as such, the use of it implies a still more universal
relation to the thing, because, when it is used, the thing in
its particularity is not recognised but is negated by the user.
When I mark a thing as mine, I attribute to it the universal
predicate 'mine' and 'recognise' its particular characteristics
in the sense that I do not interfere with them. But when I use
it I 'negate' its particular characteristics in the sense that
I change them to suit my purpose. To mark land as mine by fencing
it does not change its character, but to use it, e.g. by planting
it, does. The thing is reduced to a means to the satisfaction
of my need. When I and the thing meet, an identity is established
and therefore one or other must lose its qualitative character.
But I am alive, a being who wills and is truly affirmative; the
thing on the other hand is something physical. Therefore the
thing must b destroyed while I preserve myself. This, in general
terms, is the prerogative and the principle of the organic.

§ 60

To use a thing by grasping it directly is in itself to take possession
of a single thing here and now. But if my use of it is
grounded on a persistent need, and if I make repeated use of a
product which continually renews itself, restricting my use if
necessary to safeguard that renewal, then these and other circumstances
transform the direct single grasp of the thing into a mark, intended
to signify that I am taking it into my possession in a universal
way, and thereby taking possession of the elemental or organic
basis of such products, or of anything else that conditions them.

§ 61

Since the substance of the thing which is my property is, if we
take the thing by itself, its externality, i.e. its non-substantiality
— in contrast with me it is not an end in itself
(see § 42)
and since in my use or employment of it this externality is
realised, it follows that my full use or employment of a thing
is the thing in its entirety, so that if I have the full use of
the thing I am its owner. Over and above the entirety of its
use, there is nothing left of the thing which could be the property
of another.

Addition:
The relation of use to property is the same as that of substance
to accident, inner to outer, force to its manifestation. Just
as force exists only in manifesting itself, so arable land is
amble land only in bearing crops. Thus he who has the use of
arable land is the owner of the whole, and it is an empty abstraction
to recognise still another property in the object itself.

§ 62

My merely partial or temporary use of a thing, like my partial
or temporary possession of it (a possession which itself is simply
the partial or temporary possibility of using it) is therefore
to be distinguished from ownership of the thing itself. If the
whole and entire use of a thing were mine, while the abstract
ownership was supposed to be someone else's, then the thing as
mine would be penetrated through and through by my will (see §s
52 and 61),
and at the same time there would remain in the thing
something impenetrable by me, namely the will, the empty will,
of another. As a positive will, I would be at one and the same
time objective and not objective to myself in the thing — an absolute
contradiction. Ownership therefore is in essence free and complete.

Remark:
To distinguish between the right to the whole and entire use of
a thing and ownership in the abstract is the work of the empty
Understanding for which the Idea — i.e. in this instance the unity
of (a) ownership (or even the person's will as such) and (b) its
realisation — is not the truth, but for which these two moments
in their separation from one another pass as something which is
true. This distinction, then, as a relation in the world of fact,
is that of an overlord to nothing, and this might be called an
'insanity of personality'(if we may mean by 'insanity' not merely
the presence of a direct contradiction between a man's purely
subjective ideas and the actual facts of his life), because 'mine'
as applied to a single object would have to mean the direct presence
in it of both my single exclusive will and also the single exclusive
will of someone else.

In the Institutes we read: Usufruct is the right of
using another's property, of enjoying its fruits short of waste
of its substance ... Nevertheless, in order that properties should
not remain wholly unused through the entire cessation of usufruct,
the law has been pleased to ordain that in certain circumstances
the right of usufruct shall be annulled and that the owner proper
shall resume the land.' Placuit! As if it were in the first
instance a whim or a fiat to make this proviso and thereby give
some sense to that empty distinction! A proprietas SEMPER
abscedente usufructu would not merely be ututilis, it
would be no Proprietas at all.

To examine other distinctions in property itself, e.g. between
resmancipi and nec mancipi, dominium quiritarium
and bonitarium, &C., is inappropriate here since they
have no bearing on any of the modifications of property determined
by the concept and are merely tit-bits culled from the history
of the right of property. The empty distinction discussed above,
however, is in a way contained in the relations of dominium
directum and dominium utile, in the contractus emphyteuticus,
in the further relations involved in estates in fee with the ground
rents and other rents, dues, villeinage, &c., entailed in
their sundry modifications, in cases where such burdens are irredeemable.
But from another point of view, these relations preclude that
distinction. They preclude it in so far as burdens are entailed
in dominium utile, with the result that dominium directum
becomes at the same time a dominium utile. Were there
nothing in these two relationships except that distinction in
its rigid abstraction, then in them we would not have two overlords
(domini) in the strict sense, but an owner on the one hand
and an overlord who was the overlord of nothing on the other.
But on the score of the burdens imposed there are two owners
standing in relation to each other. Although their relation is
not that of being common owners of a property, still the transition
from it to common ownership is very easy — a transition which
has already begun in dominium directum when the yield of
the property is calculated and looked upon as the essential thing,
while that incalculable factor in the overlordship of a property,
the factor which has perhaps been regarded as the honourable thing
about property, is subordinated to the utile which here
is the rational factor.

It is about a millennium and a half since the freedom of personality
began through the spread of Christianity to blossom and gain recognition
as a universal principle from a part, though still a small part,
of the human race. But it was only yesterday, we might say, that
the principle, of the freedom of property became recognised in
some places. This example from history may serve to rebuke the
impatience of opinion and to show the length of time that mind
requires for progress in its self-consciousness.

§ 63

A thing in use is a single thing determined quantitatively and
qualitatively and related to a specific need. But its specific
utility, being quantitatively determinate, is at the same time
comparable with [the specific utility of] other things of like
utility. Similarly, the specific need which it satisfies is at
the same time need in general and thus is comparable on its particular
side with other needs, while the thing in virtue of the same considerations
is comparable with things meeting other needs. This, the thing's
universality, whose simple determinate character arises from the
particularity of the thing, so that it is eo ipso abstracted
from the thing's specific quality, is the thing's value, wherein
its genuine substantiality becomes determinate and an object of
consciousness. As full owner of the thing, I am eo ipso owner
of its value as well as of its use.

Remark:
The distinctive character of the property of a feudal tenant is
that he is supposed to be the owner of the use only, not of the
value of the thing.

Addition: The qualitative disappears here in the form of the quantitative;
that is to say, when I speak of 'need', I use a term under which
the most various things may be brought; they share it in common
and so become commensurable. The advance of thought here therefore
is from a thing's specific quality to a character which is indifferent
to quality, i.e. quantity. A similar thing occurs in mathematics.
The definition of a circle, an ellipse, and a parabola reveals
their specific difference. But in spite of this, the distinction
between these different curves is determined purely quantitatively,
i.e. in such a way that the only important thing is a purely quantitative
difference which rests on their coefficients alone, on purely
empirical magnitudes. In property, the quantitative character
which emerges from the qualitative is value. Here the qualitative
provides the quantity with its quantum and in consequence is as
much preserved in the quantity as superseded by it. If we consider
the concept of value, we must look on the thing itself only as
a symbol; it counts not as itself but as what it is worth. A
bill of exchange, for instance, does not represent what it really
is - paper; it is only a symbol of another universal - value.
The value of a thing may be very heterogeneous; it depends on
need. But if you want to express the 'value of a thing not in
a specific case but in the abstract, then it is money which expresses
this. Money represents any and every thing, though since it does
not portray the need itself but is only a symbol of it, it is
itself controlled by the specific value [of the commodity]. Money,
as an abstraction, merely expresses this value. It is possible
in principle to be the owner of a thing without at the same time
being the owner of its value. If a family can neither sell nor pawn its
goods, it is not the owner of their value. But since this form
of property is not in accordance with the concept of property,
such restrictions on ownership (feudal tenure, testamentary trusts)
are mostly in course of disappearing.

§ 64

The form given to a possession and its mark are themselves externalities
but for the subjective presence of the will which alone constitutes
the meaning and value of externalities. This presence, however,
which is use, employment, or some other mode in which the will
expresses itself, is an event in time, and what is objective in
time is the continuance of this expression of the will. Without
this the thing becomes a res nullius, because it has been
deprived of the actuality of the will and possession. Therefore
I gain or lose possession of property through prescription.

Remark:
Prescription, therefore, has not been introduced into law solely
from an external consideration running counter to right in the
strict sense, i.e. with a view to truncating the disputes and
confusions which old claims would introduce into the security
of property. On the contrary, prescription rests at bottom on
the specific character of property as 'real', on the fact that
the will to possess something must express itself.

Public memorials are national property, or, more precisely, like
works of art in general so far as their enjoyment is concerned,
they have life and count as ends in themselves so long as they
enshrine the spirit of remembrance and honour. If they lose this
spirit, they become in this respect res nullius in the
eyes of a nation and the private possession of the first comer,
like e.g. the Greek and Egyptian works of art in Turkey.

The right of private property which the family of an author has
in his publications dies out for a similar reason; such publications
become res nullius in the sense that like public memorials,
though in an opposite way, they become public property, and, by
having their special handling of their topic copied, the private
property of anyone.

Vacant land consecrated for a burial ground, or even to lie unused
in perpetuity, embodies an empty absent arbitrary will. If such
a will is infringed, nothing actual is infringed, and hence respect
for it cannot be guaranteed.

Addition:
Prescription rests on the presumption that I have ceased to regard
the thing as mine. If a thing is to remain mine, my will must
continue in it, and using it or keeping it safe shows this continuance.
That public memorials may lose their value was frequently shown
during the Reformation in the case of foundations, endowments,
&c., for the Mass. The spirit of the old faith, i.e. of these
foundations, had fled., and consequently they could be seized
as private property.

C. Alienation of Property

§ 65

The reason I can alienate my property is that it is mine only
in so far as I put my will into it. Hence I may abandon (derelinquere)
as a res nullius anything that I have or yield it to
the will of another and so into his possession, provided always
that the thing in question is a thing external by nature.

Addition:
While prescription is an alienation with no direct expression
of the will to alienate, alienation proper is an expression of
my will, of my will no longer to regard the thing as mine. The
whole matter may also be so viewed that alienation is seen to
be a true mode of taking possession. To take possession of the
thing directly is the first moment in property. Use is likewise
a way of acquiring property. The third moment then is the unity
of these two, taking possession of the thing by alienating it.
[Taking possession is positive acquisition. Use is the
negation of a thing's Particular characteristics (see §
59). Alienation is the synthesis of Positive and negative; it
is negative in that it involves spurning the thing altogether;
it is positive because it is only a thing completely mine which
I can so spurn.]

§ 66

Therefore those goods, or rather substantive characteristics,
which constitute my own private personality and the universal
essence of my self-consciousness are inalienable and my right
to them is imprescriptible. Such characteristics are my personality
as such, my universal freedom of will, my ethical life, my religion.

Remark:
The fact that what mind is in accordance with its concept or implicitly
it also should be explicitly and existentially (the fact that
thus mind should be a person, be capable of holding property,
should have an ethical life, a religion) is the Idea which is
itself the concept of mind. As cause si, i.e as free causality,
mind is that cuius natura non potestconcipi nisi existens.

It is just in this concept of mind as that which is what it is
only through its own free causality and through its endless return
into itself out of the natural immediacy of its existence, that
there lies the possibility of a clash: i.e. what it is potentially
it may not be actually (see § 57), and vice versa what it
is actually (e.g. evil, in the case of the will) may be other
than what it is potentially. Herein lies the possibility of the
alienation of personality and its substantive being, whether this
alienation occurs unconsciously or intentionally. Examples of
the alienation of personality are slavery, serfdom, disqualification
from holding property, encumbrances on property, and so forth.
Alienation of intelligence and rationality, of morality, ethical
life, and religion, is exemplified in superstition, in ceding
to someone else full power and authority to fix and prescribe
what actions are to be done (as when an individual binds himself
expressly to steal or to murder, &c., or to a course of action
that may involve crime), or what duties are binding on one's conscience
or what religious truth is, &c.

The right to what is in essence inalienable is imprescriptible,
since the act whereby I take possession of my personality, of
my substantive essence, and make myself a responsible being, capable
of possessing rights and with a moral and religious life, takes
away from these characteristics of mine just that externality
which alone made them capable of passing into the possession of
someone else. When I have, thus annulled their externality, I
cannot lose them through lapse of time or from any other reason
drawn from my prior consent or willingness to alienate them.
This return of mine into myself, whereby I make myself existent
as Idea, as a person with rights and moral principles, annuls
the previous position and the wrong done to my concept and my
reason by others and myself when the infinite embodiment of self-consciousness
has been treated as something external, and that with my consent.
This return into myself makes clear the contradiction in supposing
that I have given into another's possession my capacity for rights,
my ethical life and religious feeling; for either I have given
up what I myself did not possess, or I am giving up what, so soon
as I possess it, exists in essence as mine alone and not as something
external.

Addition:
It is in the nature of the case that a slave has an absolute right
to free himself and that if anyone has prostituted his ethical
life by hiring himself to thieve and murder, this is an absolute
nullity and everyone has a warrant to repudiate this contract.
The same is the case if I hire my religious feeling to a priest
who is my confessor, for such an inward matter a man has to settle
with himself alone. A religious feeling which is partly in control
of someone else is no proper religious feeling at all. The spirit
is always one and single and should dwell in me. I am entitled
to the union of my potential and my actual being.

§ 67

Single products of my particular physical and mental skill and
of my power to act I can alienate to someone else and I can give
him the use of my abilities for a restricted period, because,
on the strength of this restriction, my abilities acquire an external
relation to the totality and universality of my being. By alienating
the whole of my time, as crystallised in my work, and everything
I produced, I would be making into another's property the substance
of my being, my universal activity and actuality, my personality.

Remark:
The relation here between myself and the exercise of my abilities
is the same as that between the substance of a thing and its use
(see § 61). It is only when use is restricted that a distinction
between use and substance arises. So here, the use of my powers
differs from my powers and therefore from myself, only in so far
as it is quantitatively restricted. Force is the totality of
its manifestations, substance of its accidents, the universal
of its particulars.

Addition: The distinction here explained is that between a slave and a modern
domestic servant or day-labourer. The Athenian slave perhaps
had an easier occupation and more intellectual work than is usually
the case with our servants, but he was still a slave, because
he bad alienated to his master the whole range of his activity.

§ 68

What is peculiarly mine in a product of my mind may, owing to
the method whereby it is expressed, turn at once into something
external like a 'thing' which eo ipso may then be produced
by other people. The result is that by taking possession of a
thing of this kind, its, new owner may make his own the thoughts
communicated in it or the mechanical invention which it contains,
and it is ability to do this which sometimes (i.e. in the case
of books) constitutes the value of these things and the only purpose
of possessing them. But besides this, the new owner at the same
time comes into possession of the universal methods of so expressing
himself and producing numerous other things of the same sort.

Remark:
In the case of works of art, the form — the portrayal of thought
in an external medium — is, regarded as a thing, so peculiarly
the property of the individual artist that a copy of a work of
art is essentially a product of the copyist's own mental and technical
ability. In the case of a literary work, the form in virtue of
which it is an external thing is of a mechanical kind, and the
same is true of the invention of a machine; for in the first case
the thought is presented not en bloc, as a statue is, but
in a series of separable abstract symbols, while in the second
case the thought has a mechanical content throughout. The ways
and means of producing things of that mechanical kind as things
are commonplace accomplishments.

But between the work of art at one extreme and the mere journeyman
production at the other there are transitional stages which to
a greater or less degree partake of the character of one or other
of the extremes.

§ 69

Since the owner of such a product, in owning a copy of it, is
in possession of the entire use and value of that copy qua
a single thing, he has complete and free ownership of that
copy qua a single thing, even if the author of the book
or the inventor of the machine remains the owner of the universalways and means of multiplying such books and machines, &c.
Qua universal ways and means of expression, he has not
necessarily alienated them, but may reserve them to himself as
means of expression which belong to him.

Remark:
The substance of an author's or an inventor's right cannot in
the first instance be found in the supposition that when he disposes
of a single copy of his work, he arbitrarily makes it a condition
that the power to produce facsimiles as things, a power which
thereupon passes into another's possession, should not become
the property of the other but should remain his own. The first
question is whether such a separation between ownership of the
thing and the power to produce facsimiles which is given with
the thing is compatible with the concept of property, or whether
it does not cancel the complete and free ownership (see §
62) on which there originally depends the option of the original
producer of intellectual work to reserve to himself the power
to reproduce, or to part with this power as a thing of value,
or to attach no value to it at all and surrender it together with
the single exemplar of his work. I reply that this power to reproduce
has a special character, viz. it is that in virtue of which the
thing is not merely a possession but a capital asset (see §§
170 ff.); the fact that it is such an asset depends on the particular
external kind of way in which the thing is used, a way distinct
and separable from the use to which the thing is directly destined
(the asset here is not, as has been said, an acessio naturalis
like fetura). Since then this distinction falls
into the sphere of that whose nature entails its divisibility,
into the sphere of external use, the retention of part
of a thing's [external] use and the alienation of another part
is not the retention of a proprietorship without utile.

The purely negative, though the primary, means of advancing the
sciences and arts is to guarantee scientists and artists against
theft and to enable them to benefit from the protection of their
property, just as it :was the primary and most important means
of advancing trade and industry to guarantee it against highway
robbery.

Moreover, the purpose of a product of mind is that people other
than its author should understand it and make it the possession
of their ideas, memory, thinking, &c. Their mode of expression,
whereby in turn they make what they have learnt (for 'learning'
means more than 'learning things by heart', 'memorising them';
the thoughts of others can be ",apprehended only by thinking,
and this re-thinking the thoughts of learning too) into a 'thing'
which they can alienate, very likely form of its own in every
case. The result is that they their own property the capital
asset accruing from their claim for themselves the right to reproduce
their learning in books of their own. Those engaged in the propagation
of knowledge of all kinds, in particular those whose appointed
task is teaching, have as their specific function and duty (above
all in the case of the positive sciences, the doctrine of a church,
the study of positive law, &c.) the repetition of well-established
thoughts, taken up ab extra and all of them given expression
already. The same is true of writings devised for teaching purposes
and the spread and propagation of the sciences. Now to what extent
does the new form which turns up when something is expressed again
and again transform the available stock of knowledge, and in particular
the thoughts of others who still retain external property
in those intellectual productions of theirs, into a private mental
property of the individual reproducer and thereby give him or
fail to give him the right to make them his external property
as well? To what extent is such repetition of another's material
in one's book a plagiarism? There is no precise principle of
determination available to answer these questions, and therefore
they cannot be finally settled either in principle or by positive
legislation. Hence plagiarism would have to be a matter of honour
and be held in check by honour.

Thus copyright legislation attains its end of securing the property
rights of author and publisher only to a very restricted extent,
though it does attain it within limits. The ease with which we
may deliberately change something in the form of what we are expounding
or invent a trifling modification in a large body of knowledge
or a comprehensive theory which is another's work, and even the
impossibility of sticking to the author's words in expounding
something we have learnt, all lead of themselves (quite apart
from the particular purposes for which such repetitions are required)
to an endless multiplicity of alterations which more or less superficially
stamp someone else's property as our own. For instance, the hundreds
and hundreds of compendia, selections, anthologies, &c., arithmetics,
geometries, religious tracts, &c., show how every new idea
in a review or annual or encyclopaedia, &c., can be forthwith
repeated over and over again under the same or a different title,
and yet may be claimed as something peculiarly the writer's own.
The result of this may easily be that the profit promised to
the author, or the projector of the original undertaking, by his
work or his original idea becomes negligible or reduced for both
parties or lost to all concerned.

But as for the effectiveness of honour in checking plagiarism,
what has happened is that nowadays we scarcely hear the word 'plagiarism',
nor are scholars accused of stealing each other's results. It
may be that honour has been effective in abolishing plagiarism,
or perhaps plagiarism has ceased to be dishonourable and feeling
against it is a thing of the past; or possibly an ingenious and
trivial idea, and a change in external form, is rated so highly
as originality and a product of independent thinking that the
thought of plagiarism becomes wholly insufferable.

§ 70

The comprehensive sum of external activity, i.e. life,
is not external to personality as that which itself is, immediate
and a this. The surrender or the sacrifice of life is not the
existence of this personality but the very opposite. There is
therefore no unqualified right to sacrifice one's life. To such
a sacrifice nothing is entitled except an ethical Idea as that
in which this immediately single personality has vanished and
to whose power it is actually subjected. Just as life as such
is immediate, so death is its immediate negation and hence must
come from without, either by natural causes, or else, in the service
of the Idea, by the hand of a foreigner.

Addition:
A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate,
and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence
if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it. But
may a man take his own life? Suicide may at a first glance be
regarded as an act of courage, but only the false courage of tailors
and servant girls. Or again looked upon as a misfortune, since
it is inward distraction n it may be which leads to it. But the
fundamental question is: Have I a right to take my life?
The answer will be that I, as this individual, am not
master of my life, because life, as the comprehensive sum of,
my activity, is nothing external to personality, which itself
is this immediate personality. Thus when a person is said to
have a right over his life, the words are a contradiction, because
they mean that a person has a right over himself. But he has
no such right, since he does not stand over himself and he cannot
pass judgement on himself. When Hercules destroyed himself by
fire and when Brutus fell on his sword, this was the conduct of
a hero against his personality. But as for an unqualified right
to suicide, we must simply say that there is no such thing, even
for heroes.

Transition from Property to Contract

§ 71

Existence as determinate being is in essence being for
another (see Remark to § 48).
One aspect of property is that it is an existent as an external thing, and in this respect
property exists for other external things and is connected with
their necessity and contingency. But it is also an existent as
an embodiment of the will, and from this point of view the 'other'
for which it exists can only be the will of another person. This
relation of will to will is the true and proper ground in which
freedom is existent. — The sphere of contract is made up of this
mediation whereby I hold property not merely by means of a thing
and my subjective will, but by means of another person's will
as well and so hold it in virtue of my participation in a common
will.

Remark:
Reason makes it just as necessary for men to enter into contractual
relationship — gift, exchange, trade, &c.-as to possess property
(see Remark to § 45) —
While all they are conscious
of is that they are led to make contracts by need in general,
by benevolence, advantage, &C., the fact remains that they
are led to do this by reason implicit within them, i.e. by the
Idea of the real existence of free personality, 'real' here meaning
'present in the will alone'.

Contract presupposes that the parties entering it recognise each
other n persons and property owners. It is a relationship at
the level of mind objective, and so contains and presupposes from
the start the moment of recognition (compare Remarks to §§ 35 and 57).

Addition: In a contract I hold property on the strength of a common will;
that is to say, it is the interest of reason that the subjective
will should become universal and raise itself to this degree of
actualisation. Thus in contract my will still has the character
'this', though it has it in community with another will. The
universal will, however, still appears here only in the form and
guise of community.